We ♥ web applications!

Mobalean is lead by Henri Servomaa, the original founder and mobile developer.
At Mobalean we strive to develop services which are loved by our clients and users.
By working in an agile manner, quickly adapting to changing requirements,
we can deliver quickly and often.

Henri Servomaa

Hailing from Finland, Henri has a long history with computers and the internet.
With a background in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, he has worked
in Japan as Software Developer and System Admin since 2001. In 2005, he joined a
company to develop mobile sites for the Japanese market and has been involved in mobile ever since.

Contractors

Cleve Lendon is a Canadian engineer who has been contracting for Mobalean. He came to Tokyo in 1994, and has lived here ever since.
He has broad experience as a software developer, which includes development of mainframe software,
Internet applications and mobile apps (Android and iOS).
He is especially skilled at writing Java applications (vd. Simredo 4, Grafikilo 15).
When not programming, Cleve enjoys improv acting and studying languages, such as Latin and Esperanto.

Mobalean Alumni

Paul McMahon and Michael Reinsch were co-founders of Mobalean. They have moved to Doorkeeper KK, a company they established in 2013. Both are now actively developing the doorkeeper platform.

Web Development

Our strength is crafting web services for both Japanese and international markets.
We bring our technical and cultural experience to help you adapt your ideas into successful products.

We develop with Ruby on Rails and use the best agile practices and tools,
such as test driven development and continuous integration to achieve quality.

Japanese Mobile Consulting

We are the leading provider of technical expertise about the Japanese mobile web. Mobalean started when the smartphones were just appearing on the market.
Our Keitai Web Technology Guide
is a quick starting point for learning about the initial challenges of Japanese mobile development. Although the technology stacks have changed since the proliferation of iOS and Android, some of the idiosyncrasies remain. Most notably, the Japanese market is still very much dominated by the big three carriers: DoCoMo, au and Softbank.
Developers can find more technical details in our Keitai-Dev Wiki.

Call us

Cleaning up your CSS with selectors

I noticed that one of the input fields on one of our sites was not being styled properly. For the project, we're using the Ruby on Rails gem simple form for generating our forms. In addition to reducing a lot of duplicated code in your forms, it also generates ids for every input. We were using these ids to style 'exceptional' elements.

For instance, we had some fields that only excepted two or three characters, and we styled the input width to match with the following.

Because one of the fields that accepted up to three characters wasn't in this list, it wasn't being styled pro perly. One fix could have been to add that field to the list, but using CSS selectors, we can solve the bug in a better manner.

These rules will match all elements of the number type, with a size of two and three respectively. By using these rules, as opposed to explicitly listing out which elements we want the styling to apply to or adding a CSS class, there is nothing special we need to remember to do when adding a new element. Everything just works.